


mercury outran gabriel

by alright_alright



Series: SP Drabble Bomb May 2018 [1]
Category: South Park
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Childhood Friends, Childhood Memories, Constellations, Drabble, Established Relationship, Existential Angst, Going Home, Memories, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Nostalgia, Old Friends, Snow, Sort Of, Trees, because it wouldn't be my fic without nostalgia, bibles, but there's dialogue sorta, craig's very bad with words, how come that's not a tag, i'm so offended rn, it's kinda a character study probs, kind of, kinda vague, polaroids, sort of sweet, space talk, this is a little odd tbh guys, this is not religious at all btw, useless craig, vague refs to religious figures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-15 21:58:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14798723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alright_alright/pseuds/alright_alright
Summary: So, Craig took his polaroid out, spoke as a mist among only mist, twelve years ago. He thought he snapped it up in time. He thought he had tricked God, and tomorrow, too, because this was a good place to keep, once, and he didn't want it to vanish.(day 2: photograph)





	mercury outran gabriel

**Author's Note:**

> hey guys! thought i'd try this drabble bomb thing that @blamecanada's organized cause it looked fun. tbh, this is kinda unedited and a little vague, but it's a drabble. if you have any prompts, or wanna see something in a story, let me know. i'm looking to write something longer and newer. 
> 
> as always, tho, if you hate something, please be honest and tell me so i can improve. :3 thanks my dudes. <3

It’s very decayed, but it’s still there, plucky and pretty. 

Craig tore pages about Goliath out, when he was little. He replaced Gabriel with Mercury, and thought about the day that he’d stand on the glowing silver moon. 

It'd be bright, he was pretty sure, but most of all, it’d be quiet.  

A beautiful silence that pin dropping couldn’t disturb. A pretty little silence that Cain and Abel didn’t fight in, a place to live in alone, so very alone, and Craig was more than accepting of that thought. 

Craig tries to smile, because it’s still there, but it feels manufactured.

Craig grew in a dilapidated home, whose front porch had lost the battle against mold ages before his father bought the two-story house. The porch aggressively rotted the days away. He’d been the first to discover when his own foot sunk through the hole at age seven. 

His father said he’d sue the damn owners that let the house mold over. 

His father was unwell. 

The backdoor was open in August, _always_. Craig remembers the smell of hot grass, he remembers the way he had to slam the frail wooden screen door to shut it. It had a worn brass knob that got brighter as the years moved on. 

It was one of the few things that Craig liked about the house, the door knob that just shined on, sparked sunlight, and welcomed moonlight. 

If Craig squints today, in the clouds and among all the snow, staring into the empty lot where this house used to be, he thinks he can see his sister’s crayons lining the worn fuchsia couch. _Right_ there, there they were, knock-off Crayolas. A pack of waxy things from a restaurant that she toted around. 

If Craig puts these memories back in the world, he’s sure that the crayons lost in the couch were lime green, pink, and the yellow one that got split to pieces. 

Craig always hated that yellow one. The chunks of wax got everywhere, they broke under him, and Ruby would never pick up her damn crayons, and Craig never understood _why,_ why it couldn’t hold itself together under a little pressure.

Right there, fifteen years ago, he was here. And he's here today, but not much else is.

“Space case,” Tweek calls on him now, and Craig forgot the bastard's here with him, in the rumbling of winter. He knocks his fist to Craig’s shoulder, and only then does Craig register he's come back from the car with dry knuckles full of bright bandaids. Craig can give this empty lot back to the world today, if he feels like confronting anything in his past besides summer baseball with his best friend. “You know there’s a fee if y-you stand here too long.” 

Craig must be looking weird, he must be acting weird, because Tweek never tries this hard to talk so softly, to make a _joke_ , if you could call what he said that. It’s a daze, Tweek’s voice has always been a place that lulls Craig to sleep, but even it's not getting through the noise in his head today. 

Craig can’t shake the feeling. The light bible served mostly as a polaroid case, but he's pulled it up from the rubble, and it feels like four bricks in his hands. The longer he lets the weight sit, the more he can taste the must, the burnt toast of his long-gone childhood home.  

Back then, back in those days turning nights, only the small bathroom light was on when Craig came home, content in elementary school, and lovesick in high school. The light glowed violet, violet rays under the mirror medicine cabinet, with a water stained lampshade. Craig wishes the house smelled like wet grass, like dew, but it never did.  

His dad kept the bible like a box of polaroids, though, this one right here. His dad kept, and  _holy shit_ , Craig can't believe he kept it, and it's mostly survived the rubble burial. Craig's dad would wander around in a drug-induced haze, some nights. Aimlessly, dad would patter through everything, rest his hand on his stomach, and think life, and the purpose of it, but Craig was too embarrassed to ask specifics back then. Craig has a feeling that Tweek would understand, if he felt like talking. 

But dad's dead now, and Craig doesn’t feel much like talking about it today, under spitting snow skies.

Craig shifts through the polaroids hidden in his old bible. Tweek looks on, curiously, eyebrows arching like the nosy bastard he is, and Craig’s grateful for this moment. 

The first polaroid’s of a carving, mold spilling over the rotting carcass of a tree that's long been cut down. The carving says _spaceship_ , in shitty chicken scratch, out looking like an ugly sore doctors would remove. It's still a horrid sight, but Craig loved that tree. He kinda grew with it. The word carved into the trunk was beautiful and small. Like it was only meant for someone who spent enough time staring at one place, someone who noticed things.

 _Spaceship_. That's all Craig saw, all he needed to see.

So he took his polaroid out, twelve years ago, and snapped it up in time. It was a good place to keep, and Craig didn't want to forget it.  

He came back to it some evenings in high school, when he needed to be alone, when he couldn’t share how he was feeling, _what_ was eating him, all the things that wouldn’t stop eating him up. 

High school was overwhelming, and honestly, too much to deal with so Craig tried not to categorize his feelings. He found it best to stuff them away, and try to sort them out when he was all alone by the tree.

Craig remembers autumn days there. His lip was busted and bleeding, his knuckles were swollen, and he didn't feel much like heading home.

Two Christmases, and his relatives had pissed him off for the last time, criticizing all the choices he’d made in his life, and he wound up there.

Valentine’s Day, three years in a row he sat by that tree, so no one would bother him because how damn humiliating is that holiday?

By the tree, Craig remembers rejection, that awful feeling in the pitiful loneliness of his stomach at fifteen. He remembers the hollow yelling of his home, _burnt_ charred black toast, and it was Cancer he saw when he looked at the sky. 

Cancer for quiet eons. 

The universe was so large, and Craig knows as he holds onto the polaroid, and thumbs his gloved finger over it, it's something he _can't_  possibly forget. There was space, back then, and Craig can almost feel it now: purple falling galaxies adjusting to the sun’s star bright life, and Craig was just a millisecond among them. He was so small. 

Not much he did mattered. Time wasn’t a big deal. His life wasn’t a big deal. His mistakes weren’t a big deal, and they were yesterday. With Cancer in the sky, _spaceship_ behind him, Craig was just a small collection of cells among eons of creatures, of beasts much wilder, and more dangerous than his actions could ever think of being, and Craig found himself soothed. His face relaxed, it almost always did, as mellowed himself out by that tree.

In senior year, Craig pressed down his shirt. He bit down his weird, awfully annoying feelings about his best friend that made him notice _everything_ about the guy, and laid against the tree with algebra, physics, and equations, all the things he _could_ solve, because he was so sure those feelings would never work out. 

Craig wrote in his broken-spined bible, this one he's holding today. It's still all lovely and effortless. The pages are stuck together, some bugs have been pressed, some have eaten away at the words, but Craig knows Eve found a spaceship in his daydreams, not an apple.

Craig stayed by the tree until the sky had darkened and the sun twisted out, let everything drench itself black and eventually, it became difficult for Craig to see his own hand in front of his face. So he would walk towards his house, those days, feeling his confidence deflating, and his feet practically tripping over each other slowly in a race to see who would lose first.  

Those days are over, Craig has to remind himself. Those days are demolished, missing, _vacant,_ and smaller than milliseconds. They were so short, in the eons that wind up the universe, and they didn’t matter much.

Like his long-gone house.  

In the end, the front porch rotted, and dad, well.

Dad was unwell.

Tweek is fresh beside him, smelling like dying weeds and poppy seeds, and the afternoon's peeling into evening. Tweek takes the bible, not bothering to ask, and Craig doesn't say anything about it. 

“Huh.” Tweek scrunches his nose up, so close to how he did when they were younger. Tweek's changed, but it's a flick of the past in front of Craig, and he wishes the polaroid camera still worked; hell, still _existed._  Tweek's cheeks are red-tinged, his hands should be cold, _Tweek_ should be cold, but he doesn't act it. Tweek turns the book in his dry cracked hands, lovely things in the summer, looking like he’s a hundred years old all winter. 

“You should use lotion.” Craig remarks, but Tweek shrugs because he’s never been a planner so much as a doer, an explorer of wonderful worlds, and he’s never really cared what he looks like. It’s his mind, and he spins records. Tweek doesn’t live in time. Time has never been linear for Tweek, and Craig would like to say he’s not envious of the way Tweek thinks, but Craig doesn't lie. 

There are wonderful places Tweek goes, interesting paths that interweave and always find a way to be. Tweek seems happy with simply  _being_ , some days, without the electricity, the buzzing hum of other people. Tweek can sit for hours, he can stare at nothing, and he doesn't get exhausted when he visits his mind.

Craig really wants to learn how to do that.

“Shit, dude, did you bleed all over this, this thing?” Craig says nothing, because he knows he did bleed, some nights out by the tree, some nights alone on the late bus back from robotics in high school. “Hey, man,” Tweek laughs, all too familiar, all too soon, and Craig feels a little bit like breaking. “Isn’t this,” Tweek points to a section in his bible, where the letters have faded only to be covered up by polaroids. There's a photo, a long road that curves with tall pine trees, and Tweek's bleached smile from a distance. Craig was always at a distance, back then. “The summer we went t-to the ocean? I forgot," Tweek says, but Craig knows he didn't forget, that he's only trying to pull Craig away from his thoughts. "You didn't have to stray so far away. What color was your spaceship?”

“What?” Craig asks. 

“Your spaceship,” Tweek says, softer, with his weather-cracked fingers working their way to catch Craig’s shoulder off guard. “What color?”

“It was years ago.” 

" _Years ago_ is not a color."

"Yeah, it is." Craig tries retorting, but he can't muster the guts for it today.

“Hey,” Tweek frowns. “Life doesn’t live on a dime, you know?”

“Yeah,” Tweek looks back at the bible, flips through the pages. "Sure." Craig says, cautiously, and he doesn't know why.

“ _I_ remember this one. Solomon was gonna cut the _spaceship_ in half,” Tweek says, pointing to a passage that’s overwritten with Craig’s old script. Craig doesn't laugh, not that he would anyway, but he's not retorting jackshit, so Tweek frowns at the bible. “You don’t have to front anything. You don’t _always_ n-need to be _brave_. S’okay to be upset. It reminds me that you're actually _not_ a r-robot sometimes, man, when you break a sweat. Or cry a little.”

“But I’m not upset.” 

“Liar.”

“Nope." Craig's still popping the  _p,_ so Tweek guesses he hasn't lost Craig completely to his forest of thoughts.

“Can’t you just,” Tweek sighs dramatically, and his hands are somehow colder than the winter surrounding them. They wind up holding onto Craig’s gloved fingers, and Tweek’s swinging their hands together to the pulse of the cars humming beyond the hill. “You know?” 

“Try again, honey?” Craig asks, shaking his head. 

“Not in this moon, not if you won’t.” 

“What?” Craig deadpans, dumbly.

“I wouldn’t even, wouldn’t even care if you wanted to g-go out and eat leaves in the woods, man! I’d do that, I totally would! I’d even, I’d recite this,” Tweek waves the bible around dramatically. Craig feels he should be cracking an amused grin, but he doesn't. “In front of my boss on M-monday, man, I’d _totally_ d-do that. You never know, and these,” Tweek uses the bible to point to Craig’s head, and takes their joined hands up to Craig's mouth. Craig stills, always when Tweek does this to this day, even though years have passed, and they've only grown closer. “These things are meant to be used, so, you just gotta talk to me. If you want. Or,” Tweek sighs, the swinging of their hands slowing. “Whatever.” 

"I," Craig starts. "I try to." 

"I know," Tweek hums thoughtfully. "I know you do."

"Words are annoying fucks."

"Yeah," Tweek agrees. "They kinda hate on you, don't they? Remember when you," Tweek smiles a little. "Sophomore year, remember how you w-walked up to Browning, and you said," Tweek looks lost, so he closes his eyes, and Craig knows he's visualizing that year, that he's walking through the linoleum halls of their old high school now. He's even hearing Token laugh with Clyde over potato fries. It was a shitty place to be, but sometimes you remember the good things, so the bad things don't swallow you whole. "Man, _what_  was it you said to get th-that, that much detention?"

“Where did everybody go?” Craig repeats, in a whisper croaking voice, and it feels like he's really asking the question, really looking for an answer, because he can’t help it. He can’t. He’s still human in winters that should be waters, in places that smell like campfires. Eons and eons ago, it feels like, he sat by the tree, and swore silently to equations that made more sense than his life that he wouldn’t put himself up for rejection again. 

But he was young, stupid, too, and that was only a millisecond in time. The promises Craig makes to himself always break first, anyway, and what fun would tomorrow be tied down to some shitty way of living  _safely_? Why be so safe? 

Craig's trying to cut the bond to his old self, to his old rules of being alone, of brick walls but it's tough. 

“I don’t know. I,” Tweek sighs, because he knows that's not really what Craig told Browning that day. Craig didn't say it like that, Craig wasn't sad like this back then, and Tweek's running out of magic tricks to cheer the space case up. “I never left the door open,” Tweek gently places the decayed bible in the sack for a messenger bag he carries around. “We could find them. Totally, spaceboy,” Tweek’s fingers are the finer things of life, all plucky and pretty. Bandaids hanging on only by the faint prayers Tweek whispers to them, some nights, when Craig catches him awake in their kitchen. Tweek points to his head now, his eyes reflect nothing but the sky, and he stares into Craig’s face. “If you want, they visit here some days. Close your eyes, and we’ll catch them b-by the meadow, okay? Like, like salamanders.” Tweek says, giving Craig this big goofy smile, and Craig just nods back. He doesn’t even retort that it’s February, how can you catch something that’s not even born yet? 

Tweek would probably wire an answer, all sagely and flowery, and Craig would listen. 

But tonight, Craig can’t. 

Craig can’t because he tore pages about Goliath out, when he was smaller, when his house stood there, a bright blue, all alone on this part of town. Craig rewrote Gabriel’s fate, he worded everyone’s intentions in a way he’d understand _._   

Once, when Craig was small, he held onto that polaroid of the tree, and thought about the day that he’d stand on the glowing silver moon. 

Tweek pulls on his hand again, and together, they watch the nothing that's consuming Craig. They watch what's left of the house that used to exist go under the muffled sound of snowfall. It's collecting an almost deafening quiet. The car’s covered. Craig’s feeling cold. He can’t believe Tweek’s still managing, but he’s this bright thing that’s rarely quiet. Tonight, Craig soaks up the calm, overwhelmed with this unexplainable feeling because Tweek is existing on the same universe, the same time, the same millisecond in eons and eons of other creatures, of collections of cells, and isn’t that lucky?

Craig’s grateful, yeah, but it’s more than that. He thinks about saying this to Tweek, but the words fail him. He tangles his fingers with Tweek’s, because he’s never been great at talking, and the words have _always_ failed him. He hopes that Tweek understands, he hopes his hand is enough.

Craig lived in a dilapidated home that sprained his ankle when he was seven. The backdoor was open in August, _always_ was back then. Craig can still remember the smell of hot grass, cut by the lawn mower, and he doesn’t remember the wooden door with the frayed screen that let all the mosquitos in. He remembers the bright brassy door knob, worn in time, and Craig wonders what happened to it. 

He hopes it’s still sparking light, somewhere.

It’s February, the month of purification, and Tweek is next to him, swaying like juniper in the howls of the wind.

If Craig squints tonight, turns away from the lot, and looks far into the clouds, Tweek’s car will still be collecting snow behind them. The stars are covered up, the sky’s a fading orange, a faulty mauve, and Craig’s seen it all.

The snow, he can try to imagine, would have painted the falling porch of that long-gone blue house off-white, all alone in this part of town.

Craig’s standing among it all, and it’s just an empty lot tonight. He can’t see his sister’s crayons lining the old fuchsia couch, not even if he tries and closes his eyes, because Tweek’s standing next to him, caring for his old bible like it’s a damn important document that needs to be preserved. Craig could smile, because _right_ here, fifteen years ago, there they were. Just kids writing stories about super heroes, guinea pigs fighting off yard gnomes, and they thought they were so goddamn _sure_ they knew how to spell. _Like_ was  _liek,_ in knock-off Crayolas, and the stars were aligned. 

Craig wants to go back to a time where he didn't know all that he does now, because he's never known anything, never been more sure of anything than when he was nine, and sounding out the words was the correct way, the only way, to spell them. Confidence comes in small doses these days.

If Craig puts these memories back in the world, if he lays the polaroids out on the ground, Craig thinks a map would appear before them. Craig’s sure that under the demolished house, they’d find fifteen-year-old crayons, half-melted and lost to the world, and if he told Tweek that, Tweek would probably feel something close to sadness for the crayons, the empathetic bastard, because it's something forgotten. 

But is it _really_ such a bad fate for a collection of knock-offs, a collection of cells? 

Time exists here, in Tweek’s grasp, but time flies on like the spaceship carving, too, and it can't lie awake in the polaroids. 

Tonight, Tweek sways their hands, like some homey seesaw.

Craig can smile, because he’s still here, between eons and eons of life, and isn't that lucky enough for a collection of cells?


End file.
